Eyes on the prize in China

Milburn Line

President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao met this week in Washington, D.C, in the shadow of our celebration of America’s greatest civil rights leader. As they work to reset the U.S.-China relationship, they should also honor that legacy by considering the treatment of Chinese advocates for justice and democracy. Our own experience of the civil rights movement is a good starting point.

Beijing’s angry reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Liu Xiaobo masks a heated internal debate within the Communist Party about political reform, with leaders as high as Prime Minister Wen Jiabao issuing favorable signals. Now is the time for our president to begin to convince the Chinese political elite of the benefits of pluralism and accountability. Last year’s Nobel awardee discussing this year’s as a legitimate recipient instead of a dissident could be a tipping point for democratic development, just as the civil rights movement was one for more authentic democracy here in the U.S.

During the Cold War, the United States was certainly defensive about international scrutiny of race relations. The Soviets exploited the issue in their propaganda, and one could still see 1963 footage of police mistreating demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., on the news in Moscow in 1987. Earlier on, renowned human rights champion Eleanor Roosevelt threatened to resign from the NAACP board to prevent it from pursuing a case at the United Nations to investigate treatment of African-Americans in the United States.

A half-century later, our president and officials at the highest levels of government are of African-American descent – something scarcely imaginable when racial segregation was the norm. Civil rights leaders were stigmatized as radicals and persecuted legally, not unlike many of China’s would-be reformers.

Liu Xiaobo’s offense was to co-author and sign, along with 300 other notables,“Charter ‘08,” which states:

“After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle ... Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A ‘modernization’ bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature and destroys human dignity. Where will China head in the 21st century? Continue a ‘modernization’ under this kind of authoritarian rule? Or recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization and build a democratic political system?”

In China, the combination of an expanding economy and a monopoly on political authority have led to corruption, environmental degradation and displacement following land expropriations – all of which have resulted in tens of thousands of public disturbances as local communities express their frustration. The Communist Party has seen these as a challenge to its authority, but there is now an opportunity for advocating for an institutional architecture for both accountability and conflict management, including transparent and independent judicial oversight. Prime Minister Wen has linked political reform to making the economic successes of the last 25 years sustainable. In October, a group of 23 retired party members issued a call for full freedom of the press. President Hu has not been convinced.

Like China, America’s economic surge in the 1950s led to greater prosperity, increased education levels and reflections on the justice of our political system. The civil rights movement was a painful struggle for the human rights of African-Americans, but the response of key leaders and institutions – including judicial decisions for desegregation, civil rights and voting rights legislation, and mobilizing federal law enforcement to ensure compliance at key moments – helped institutionalize a still-incomplete path toward greater equality in the United States.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of sit-ins that started in Greensboro, N.C., and challenged racial segregation across the south, it’s a good time to engage the Chinese not as critics, but as people whose “modernization” has struggled to overcome inequality and ensure human rights for all citizens. Who better than our president to convince the Chinese leadership that “dissidents” like Liu Xiaobo – like the once-vilified leaders of our civil rights movement – may be those most committed to a just and stable polity?